PG&E's Sven Thesen, Supervisor for Clean Air Transportation, says the
utility expects to buy batteries from plug-in cars (PHEVs and EVs)
for secondary stationery uses, and he shows a reporter how it works.
This first demonstration used a stock Prius battery, which is
designed for power, not energy: current Prius conversions have
batteries that make available 15-30 times as much energy.

PG&E continues to be a PHEV trailblazer: on April 9, the company
became the first utility to conduct a public demonstration of a
rudimentary "vehicle-to-grid" (V2G) setup. (at the Alternative Energy
Solutions Summit, held at AMD headquarters in Sunnyvale -- see video
links at <http://www.calcars.org/audio-video.html>.) Last September,
the utility sent a mailer promoting plug-in hybrids to its five
million customers.

CALCARS COMMENTS
Plug-in cars will provide a more efficient alternative to what
utilities already do when they pump water up into high reservoirs at
night to be used during the day. This means we'll have a new answer
to the question, "what happens to all those old batteries?" We can
say, "when they're still working fine, but a bit less efficient,
there's a way to keep them working for years to come." (Batteries
don't fail; they degrade slowly. Years from now, when your PHEV's
25-mile range battery takes you only 20 miles, you'll be able to
trade it in for a new one, knowing that your old battery will
continue providing benefits! And their relatively benign raw
materials will be recycled many years later.)

This is all part of the larger V2G picture. Utilities can start
building new business models based on the distributed energy storage
system they've always wanted. V2G will turn intermittent night-time
wind power into a reliable 24-hour energy source. It will "valley
fill" and "peak shave" utility load curves (and by enabling more
efficient use of generating plants, we might all get lower monthly
bills). And it will bring a revenue stream back to plug-in car owners
who allow the utilities to tap their batteries for spinning reserves
and regulation services. All the technologies needed to make this
happen already exist. We hope other utilities will join in confirming
their intention to buy older batteries down the road.

This announcement also bolsters current discussions about third-party
battery warranties that could motivate carmakers to start building
PHEVs before they are sure the batteries will last the lifetime of
the car. And along with the "Cash-Back PHEV" concept popularized by
Federal Energy Regulatory Commissionier Jon Wellinghoff (see
CalCars-News Archive), by further improving the already favorable
Lifetime Total Cost of Ownership advantage of PHEVs, it can be the
basis for enhanced state and federal Executive Orders and public and
private fleet commitments.

The exclusive story appears in the "Green Wombat" blog
<http://blogs.business2.com/greenwombat/> of Business2.0, a Time
Warner publication, written by Todd Woody, an assistant managing
editor at Business 2.0 magazine; Woody is the former business editor
of the San Jose Mercury News.

California utility PG&E has given Green Wombat an exclusive look at
new technology that could provide a big boost to both the nascent
electric car market and renewable energy production. In the coming
years, the utility plans to buy thousands of plug-in hybrid and
electric car batteries once they've outlived their usefulness for
transportation and install them in the basements of office towers and
at electrical substations. The batteries will store green energy and
and be used to cut peak demand for expensive - and greenhouse
gas-emitting - electricity. On a recent morning, Green Wombat went
down to a sub-basement below PG&E's (PCG) San Francisco headquarters
where the utility parks its plug-in hybrid Toyota (TM) and Mercedes
fuel-cell car. Against one wall a nickel metal hydride battery
salvaged from a wrecked Prius sat on a metal cart attached to an
inverter that converts the battery's DC power into AC power. (In the
photos the battery is on middle tray, the inverter on the top left.)
The setup is plugged into an electrical meter, a fluorescent light
and a portable heater. "The meter is spinning anti-clockwise right
now," says Sven Thesen, PG&E's supervisor for clean air
transportation. "That means we have energy coming out of the building
and powering the meter. PG&E is paying for this right now." A minute
later the meter begins to spin in the opposite direction and the
lights and heater come to life as the 1.3 kilowatt/hour Prius battery
uploads electricity into the power grid. "if we put these batteries
in the distribution system and then charge them up at night, we don't
have to pack as much electricity through that distribution system to
feed this particular building," says Thesen enthusiastically.

Electric vehicle batteries generally retain 80 percent of their
capacity even after they're no longer good for powering cars. Thesen
envisions a time in the near future when banks of EV batteries are
charged at night with electricity produced by wind farms, which tend
to generate the most power in the evening when demand is the lowest.
Normally, that energy is just lost because it isn't stored. During
the day when air conditioners crank up and energy demands rise,
electricity can be released from the batteries to take the load off
the power grid. In theory, that means PG&E won't have to build as
many planet-warming natural gas-fired power plants to meet peak
demand or as an insurance policy against blackouts. It also allows
the utility to do "load leveling." Cranking up a power plant to
supply electricity when demand suddenly spikes is expensive. EV
batteries could release electricity to the grid to fill in the gaps
between supply and demand. The same is true if batteries are used at
electrical substations. "If we can put in $5,000 worth of batteries
and avoid putting in a $50,000 transformer and upgrading the lines
then everyone is a winner," Thesen says.

Electric car makers like Silcon Valley's Tesla Motors and Norway's
Think could be some of the biggest winners. The battery is the most
expensive part of an electric car, and PG&E's plan would create a
significant secondary market for them, especially if other utilities
like Southern California Edison (SCE) and San Diego Gas & Electric
(SRE) follow suit. A second life for electric car batteries would
lower their cost as battery financing syndicates are formed to buy
and sell the vehicles' power plants. That would help jump start the
market for electric cars by making them more affordable. It could
also spur further technological progress in battery development to
exend their range and power. "Those batteries have some residual
capacity and that residual capacity is actually valuable," Tesla CEO
Martin Eberhard told Green Wombat last week. "At a substation you
take a whole stack of three-quarter dead batteries and just run them
into the ground and then chuck them into recycling." He said there
would be no obstacle to repurposing Tesla's powerful lithium-ion
batteries - which give its forthcoming Roadster super car its 200
mile range and zero-to-60-in-four-seconds vroom- for such use.

According to Thesen there are few technological challenges to
implementing the concept. An off-the-shelf inverter used for rooftop
solar systems will do the job, provided the batteries all carry the
same voltage. (PG&E says its working on technology to allow different
voltages to be used together.) Of course, there's a chicken-and-egg
dilemma at work here. PG&E will need thousands of such batteries, and
while Ford (F), General Motors (GM) and Toyota have made some noise
about manufacturing plug-in hybrids, no production models yet exist.
Meanwhile, the initial production runs from electric car companies
like Tesla and Think will be limited. And given that some electric
car batteries are expected to last at least five years or 100,000
miles, it will be some time before they're ready to be recycled as
mini-power plants. (A traditional hybrid battery like that found in
the Prius can be used but it produces relatively little electricity.)
Still, if PG&E and other utilities become ready buyers of EV
batteries the electric car market could expand much faster than
anticipated. And that will create another source of supply:
mint-condition batteries left behind when drivers inevitably crash their cars.

"By having these out there we don't have to import as much peak power
when it's really expensive from places that are far away," says
Thesen, who himself had his Prius converted into a plug-in. "We move
it at the cheapest most efficient time. And for PG&E that also means
it's the cleanest. So we're going to be able to upload more clean
power to the grid and it's the cheap stuff. So this is a wonderful
synergistic win-win for everyone and it will make vehicle batteries
cheaper because they will have worth. When we make an electric
battery cheaper that means more people can afford it. And that means
we put less demand on foreign oil imports."